or so I'm told...
The less good news? It turns out that all of that extra traffic was just comment spammers taking advantage of the fact that WordPress 2.0 has exactly jack and shit for combatting spam. Sure--it comes with the Akismet spam plugin, but all that does is stop spam from ending up on your blog--the spammers still access your site and your system files.
I had a look at my server logs and checked out the graph of my bandwidth usage for January and noticed that it spiked right around January 15th. Turns out it was just two days before when I started setting up WordPress 2.0 on my server.
COINCIDENCE?
Read the book!
So, it wasn't a doubling of my traffic, though I am happy with my current level of visitors, it was just WP 2.0 being the car sold with no windshield. Sure, it'll get you there, but you'll have loads of bugs in your teeth.
Is there a solution? I sure hope so.
At first I thought I'd add a capcha. A capcha are those little graphicky things that display text inside an image so 'bots can't read them but you can. You just enter the text you see and BAMMO you can comment. I had used Trencaspammers on my old install of WP, but it doesn't seem to work on WP 2.0, or, at the very least, my install of WP 2.0. So, I tried some other capchas. Most required I install some sort of graphics generating app on my server. I decided that was too complicated for my puny human-brain-sized-brain and kept looking.
I found this great plugin called [http://www.boriel.com/?page_id=17|CapCha!] which I really hoped would work for me just because it's name sounds like a word in Klingon :D Alas, despite the fact that it seems to work for a great many WP webmasters, it did not for me.
Finally, I found a plugin called [http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/wp-morph/trunk/wp-morph.php|WP-Morph] that doesn't even use capchas but claims to create a bit of JS code that will mess with the 'bots and stop them from being able to spam. The instructions were so simple (just upload the plugin and activate) I figured why not give it a try. So I did and it seems to be working (knock on George W.'s cranium).
I'll be watching my bandwidth graph for the next few days to make sure it continues to work. Let's hope it does--I can't afford to pay for that kind of bandwidth explosion every month. Hell, I can't afford to pay it THIS month... (don't forget to [http://thepete.com/donate.html|take a moment to help out!] Thanks!)
So, the good news is that I think I've figured out the problem and my web host is letting me pay them for the bandwidth overage over the next 7 months.
The less that good news is, I really don't think Jesus loves me.
OH, WELL! AT LEAST THE SITE ISN'T GOING TO BE SHUT DOWN!
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Oh yeah and more Otis and Ballpoint strips along with more FutureBlog posts will return later this week along with a vlog entry or three. Thanks for your patience!!
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